The invention relates to seafloor electromagnetic surveying for oil and other hydrocarbon reserves.
Determining the response of the sub-surface strata within the earth's crust to electromagnetic fields is a valuable tool in the field of geophysical research. The geological processes occurring in thermally, hydrothermally or magmatically active regions can be studied. In addition, electromagnetic sounding techniques can provide valuable insights into the nature, and particularly the likely hydrocarbon content, of subterranean reservoirs in the context of subterranean oil exploration and surveying.
Seismic techniques are often used during oil-exploration expeditions to identify the existence, location and extent of reservoirs in subterranean rock strata. Whilst seismic surveying is able to identify such structures, the technique is often unable to distinguish between the different possible compositions of pore fluids within them, especially for pore fluids which have similar mechanical properties. In the field of oil exploration, it is necessary to determine whether a previously identified reservoir contains oil or just aqueous pore fluids. To do this, an exploratory well is drilled to determine the contents of the reservoir. However, this is an expensive process, and one which provides no guarantee of reward.
Whilst oil-filled and water-filled reservoirs are mechanically similar, they do possess significantly different electrical properties and these provide for the possibility of electromagnetic based discrimination testing. A known technique for electromagnetic probing of subterranean rock strata is the passive magneto-telluric (MT) method. The signal measured by a surface-based electromagnetic detector in response to electromagnetic (EM) fields generated naturally, such as within the earth's upper atmosphere, can provide details about the surrounding subterranean rock strata. However, for deep-sea surveys, all but those MT signals with periods corresponding to several cycles per hour are screened from the seafloor by the highly conductive seawater. Whilst the long wavelength signals which do penetrate to the seafloor can be used for large scale undersea probing, they do not provide sufficient spatial resolution to examine the electrical properties of the typically relatively small scale subterranean reservoirs. Moreover, since MT surveying relies primarily on horizontally polarised EM fields, it is intrinsically insensitive to thin resistive layers.
Nonetheless, measurements of electrical resistivity beneath the seafloor have traditionally played a crucial role in hydrocarbon exploration and reservoir assessment and development. In industry, sub-seafloor resistivity data have generally been obtained almost exclusively by wire-line logging of wells. There are, though, clear advantages to developing non-invasive geophysical methods capable of providing such information. Although inevitably such methods would be unable to provide comparable vertical resolution to wireline logging, the vast saving in terms of avoiding the costs of drilling test wells into structures that do not contain economically recoverable amounts of hydrocarbon would represent a major economic advantage.
In research fields that are not of commercial interest, geophysical methods for mapping sub-seafloor resistivity variations by various forms of electromagnetic surveying have been under development for many years (e.g. Sinha et al., 1990; Evans et al., 1994). WO 00/13046 and WO 00/57555 make proposals for finding hydrocarbon reservoirs using such electromagnetic surveying.